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British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

bbc.com

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Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#221

Post by inigyou »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #152
watwut wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bonmot sounded cool and fun years ago, but not anymore. It is actually OK and desirable for governments to help, to organize and to lead toward positive outcome. Governments should do more then just pay military, prisons and police. Deliberate destruction and expectation of nothing positive from the governments already caused enough damage.

Probably with the exception of a country or two, governments never run a successful business when competition is involved. Never ever. So no, it is not desirable for the government to intervene in any way in private business and "save them".

They don't have to. Private business has to do at least as well as the government business or it won't make any sales, so quality increases and price decreases even if the government business doesn't sell anything.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#222

Post by squigz »

philipallstar wrote: post #218
squigz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least we got to the heart of the issue - it's too costly to try to prevent people from killing themselves. Truly perfect example of how capitalism views life. Of course, that most people regret their attempt after being saved by those 10-20 cops is irrelevant, right? I wonder what the benefits to society of that person being alive come out to, vs the costs to save them. Anyway, you've completely missed my poi…

That's not capitalism, it's personal responsibility. Why do you dump all the responsibility on other people to stop someone from killing themselves, and nothing on the person actually doing it?

I don't believe I did that. One could also ask why you put all the responsibility on people who feel they need to kill themselves, and none on other people/society

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#223

Post by inigyou »

tempfile wrote: post #19
philipallstar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never sounded cool and fun. It was government acknowledging its own limitations. Governments don't perform better if we all cheer them on. Right now a government (Russia's) is waging war on a country. Last century governments caused untold death in socialist countries (Venezuela, China, USSR) because they were trying to organise centrally.

In the spirit of fairness I have to note the untold deaths caused by non-socialist countries in Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, pretty much every country in South America...

Capitalism has killed 100 million people, and that's just the verified deaths.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#224

Post by inigyou »

philipallstar wrote: post #218
squigz wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least we got to the heart of the issue - it's too costly to try to prevent people from killing themselves. Truly perfect example of how capitalism views life. Of course, that most people regret their attempt after being saved by those 10-20 cops is irrelevant, right? I wonder what the benefits to society of that person being alive come out to, vs the costs to save them. Anyway, you've completely missed my poi…

That's not capitalism, it's personal responsibility. Why do you dump all the responsibility on other people to stop someone from killing themselves, and nothing on the person actually doing it?

I can't make head nor tail of this comment. What is personal responsibility?

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#225

Post by inigyou »

ExoticPearTree wrote: post #154
soco wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last century non-socialist governments caused untold deaths in many Western countries, starting with Germany for a better known example, but the entire list is quite long. So could it be that it wasn't socialism the problem?

Socialism is always the problem. If you're talking about the Nazis in Germany, socialism is in their name, you now? If you're talking before Hitler, the Kaiser was socialist. So socialism anyway you slice it.

National is also in their name. Therefore, nations killed all those people. We need to ban nations.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#226

Post by timschmidt »

pjc50 wrote: post #148
XorNot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis. A wartime effort has to keep supplies moving daily, or the front collapses. Whereas the need for vaccines is heavily deferred - your population is already vaccinated in peacetime, and you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war, nor vaccinate new population during one either: that large vaccinated population providing herd immunity…

> Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis .. what were you doing in 2020? > you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been. Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can f…

> The lab leak people are probably wrong

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#227

Post by defrost »

timschmidt wrote: post #226
pjc50 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vaccines aren't something you need urgently in a crisis .. what were you doing in 2020? > you are unlikely to need to make a novel vaccine over the course of a war The lab leak people are probably wrong, but in the present era we're a lot closer to "hook AI up to a CRISPR machine and generate a biological weapon" than we have ever been. Everyone seems to assume that we might get in a war that we recognize and can f…

> The lab leak people are probably wrong https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

That is indeed the testimony of Steven C. Quay, one of "the lab leak people" that are asserted by GP to be probably wrong.

Very few people would claim that there is no testimony for the lab leak claim, it's simply that relatively few domain scientists support that claim.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_C._Quay

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#228

Post by pseudohadamard »

georgeecollins wrote: post #111
Deukhoofd wrote: post #22

It's probably not a bad idea. Steel is one of the things that an industrialized country needs to produce to protect its own sovereignty. Letting it shut down and just hope you'll always be able to import enough steel from other countries is a bad long-term strategy. You'd be left unable to fend for yourself.

Let's imagine a hypothetical symmetrical war between two modern countries. One can disable the other's satellites and maintain their own fleet. The other can't get access to any third parties' satellites. You aren't going to send your steel navy out when one side can see you from space and you can't, almost regardless of the numbers. Your big army of steel tanks is useless against a bunch of drones directed by distri…

For Americans wondering why they were making a Judas Priest album public property, it's actually a company based in S****horpe.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#229

Post by Chu4eeno »

gruez wrote: post #158
owebmaster wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're for planning reform in uk As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich

>As long as the reform is to cut taxes for the rich Source? Strangely "tax" only has one hit within the wikipedia article, and it's not about tax cuts. If it's really such an important part of their editorial stance, you should update the article.

You are very naive about the neutrality of Wikipedia.

Maintaining the Wikipedia page is part of what any PR/reputation management agency does.

Re: British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply

#230

Post by Chu4eeno »

nephihaha wrote: post #91
flir wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most fish eaten in the UK has always been imported, e.g. Icelandic cod. Not always (Cod Wars). And our herring catch was once its own industry. > And the fact the UK fishermen were die-hard pro-Brexit is odd given they should have been aware that the majority of their regular catch was sold to EU buyers. They thought they'd have a monopoly on those fishing grounds post-Brexit.

The problem for them wasn't the sales, it was the catches. The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries. The EU fishing rules meant multiple countries could fish the same grounds meaning overfishing. The UK was much stricter on net sizes than Spain was.

> The EU was good for farmers, not so good for fisheries.

It was good for industrial farming, not the farmers themselves, one of the big reasons for Norway refusing to join was the impact it would have on farmers.

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